This is a collection of utility classes for working with Nimiq primitives in PHP. It is not meant to enable a Nimiq network node in PHP, but rather to verify signatures, derive and validate addresses and to work with serialized primitives in a PHP environment. This collection is planned to grow over time when the need arises or by additions from the community.

The Nimiq PHP Utilities are availabe via the Packagist package registry and can be installed with Composer:

composer require nimiq/utils

Please note that PHP >= 7.2 with an installed sodium extention is required to use these utilities. Please make sure that you have your operating system's equivalent of the php-sodium package installed or that you activate the sodium extension in your hosting's PHP settings.

The utility classes are available in the Nimiq\Utils namespace:

use Nimiq\Utils\AddressUtils;
use Nimiq\Utils\SignatureUtils;
use Nimiq\Utils\RpcUtils;

To generate byte-encoded strings from HEX representations, you can use sodium_hex2bin(), for example:

$public_key = sodium_hex2bin('873279e12d5af18c4e899a781e55711f7910ed8ddb85b2179ece38a570253527');

AddressUtils::pubkey2address(string $public_key[, bool $with_spaces = true]): string

Convert a public key into a Nimiq userfriendly address.

• $public_key A byte-encoded string of length 32 representing a Nimiq public key.
• $with_spaces [optional] Set to FALSE to output the address without spaces.

SignatureUtils::verify(string $signature, string $data, string $public_key): bool

Verify a signature for the given data and public key.

• $signature A byte-encoded string representing a Nimiq signature.
• $data A byte-encoded string representing the data that the signature should be verified for.
• $public_key A byte-encoded string representing the Nimiq public key of the signer.

SignatureUtils::verify_message(string $signature, string $message, string $public_key): bool

Verify a message signature for the given message and public key.

Message signatures are different from regular signatures in that the message is prefixed and hashed before being signed. This method applies these same manipulations to the message before verifying the signature.

• $signature A byte-encoded string representing a Nimiq message signature.
• $message The plain-text representation of the message that the signature should be verified for.
• $public_key A byte-encoded string representing the Nimiq public key of the signer.

RpcUtils::prepareRedirectInvocation(string $targetURL, int $id, string $returnURL, string $command, array $args, string $responseMethod): string

Generate a redirect URL with the parameters encoded in the URL fragment.

• $targetURL The base URL to redirect to, including paths and query parameters (a fragment is discarded).
• $id A numeric ID for the RPC request, must be >= 0.
• $returnURL The URl to redirect back to, when the requests succeeds or fails.
• $command The name of the function that should be called.
• $args An array of function arguments to pass to the called function.
• $responseMethod How to receive the response: 'message' (postMessage), 'url' (GET redirect), or 'post' (POST redirect)

Note: Binary strings are not yet supported in $args!

The sodium cryptographic methods are best documented in the developer's documentation: https://paragonie.com/book/pecl-libsodium.

1. Use PHP >= 7.2
2. Install the sodium extension
3. Verify that you have the sodium extension correctly installed by running php test/version_check.php - if it displays the extension's version numbers, everything is good to go

To execute a (minimal) test of these utilities' functionality, run:

php test/test.php

The expected output is:

Is valid: bool(true)
Address:  NQ03 VDL0 TSF5 CFNX VNCL 4MGK 0BX7 150E VMXA